I suspect Jagex are off your radar. They were off mine. While I was more than aware of their enormous success with the free MMO Runescape, I never quite filed it as something directly relevant to my interests in PC Games. A chance meeting with their recent brilliant arcade football game Kickabout League made me reconsider, so I grasped the chance to hook up at Develop with their CEO Mark Gehard, the Head of their new not-revealed MMO Mechscape Henrique Olifiers and PR Manager Adam Tuckwell. I come away with the impression of a proud, ambitious and iconoclastic company with a lot of big ideas. An MMO which looks at Master of Orion rather than Ultima as its inspiration? Picking up where Sensible Software left of? Real Men Programmers Do It In 64Mb? PC as pure populism, and taking that seriously? And not playing the hype game at all? It’s time Jagex got on your radar. You start here…RPS: Runescape‘s been going ages, but your latest venture – FunOrb – has been going for a year and a half. A games portal. Why? What’s your aim with it?

Mark Gerhard: Jagex is staffed by gamers. When interviewing a developer, it’s not just “can you do the job?” – because there’s a skew of developers who can – but “Show us your hobbies, your interests. How do you develop games?”. Your indie game, whatever. We’re always looking to make games we want to play – which is the success story with Runescape. FunOrb was the same kind of thinking, and perhaps showing our age a bit. We’ve been doing this for nine years, and all of a sudden, despite family and everything else, we still want to play good games. Those 16-bit classics, if you will. But getting out the old Amiga is a hassle. We wanted to create a service for time-pressured gamers, people like us, who can go back to playing those great games, as well as us being able to innovate and create new games. That was the thinking. Also, speed. With Mechscape, we’re looking at 3, 4 years, maybe more. With FunOrb, while still making a great game, we’re looking at 9-12 months. With a relatively big team, we roughly get a new game a month. We can experiment a bit more. I don’t want to say “be more creative”, but when you know you can be quite agile, you feel more free to experiment.

RPS: What sort of demographics play your game?

Mark Gerhard: We know what the players tell us – and given the population size, you can say that’s largely true. FunOrb was designed to be us. Literally, the people around here [Gestures to the Develop bar]. Given that we’ve done no promotions, what we’ve found a year into its launch… we’ve found that the average age of a Runescape player is 16. The average age of a FunOrb player, funnily enough, is 17. But we want it to be 25-35, even 45. That’s kind of the aspiration. While we have a substantial community, we want to grow it into this demographic.

Adam Tuckwell: I think Kickabout is the great example of a game we’ve polished to quite a high level, but also shows what we’re trying to do. We’re not trying to make really quick flash games with no depth or substance. We’re trying to make quality games which can be played and dropped into quite quickly. Since we haven’t done much promotional marketing, we mainly have the Runescape audience playing – but now that the portal is developing, we attract people and hopefully get the message out there that there’s market of people out there. And our games have this relatively steep curve. You have to be relatively competent in games generally to progress – but we mean them to be played in a casual way. With Kickabout, you’re about to play a 4 minute match, and then go off again. That’s the kind of thing we’re going for. It doesn’t have to be a sport title. We like to have this core competency, that you have to be a gamer to enjoy it. There’s very little out there for that sort of person. We’re looking at the sort of person who has all the consoles at home, and may not have time to play them. We also don’t want to make sure it’s not just remakes of old IPs. There’s room to innovate. Like Lexicominos, which is a lot like Tetris with words.

Mark Gerhard: We’ll also bring along some of the classic IPs. One of the reasons for Jon [Hare, Sensible Software Designer and general iconic Amiga-era figure] joining us was that on the game design side to make completely new games which aren’t just spiritual successors… but we’re also looking to bring back some of the classic IPs and license them, and make FunOrb the home for that.

RPS: People’s expectations of a webgame is the odd one. While the vast majority are the same as they ever were, we’re increasingly seeing things like Bow Street Runner which have production values up with anything. With you, you’re talking about taking games that’d have been a full release in 1991 on the Amiga and doing them on this format.

Adam Tuckwell: Web-gaming really is the future. We see people come in with the cloud-tech, and it’s the sort of thing we’ve been doing for the last ten years. Technology is all our own, and we work really hard to make as many people as possible can play our games. You can play our games with a dial-up Internet connection, as the download is very small. We want everyone to be able to play it. We’re trying to make gaming more accessible. But we’re also trying to show that you can have a genuine gaming experience in your browser. And we’re passionate about free-gaming. In Runescape, the girl who has the highest level in the free game has played for over 15,000 hours… and she’s never paid. She’s only just finished leveling her character. That’s a huge level of gameplay for free. We’re trying to show that webgaming isn’t about these quick games that are produced really quickly, have no depth or content and don’t really appeal to gamers.

RPS: So… now after Runescape, Mechscape. Why now?

Mark Gerhard: Why Mechscape… after 4 years of making and running Runscape, we got to a point where we thought maybe we know what we’re doing. We knew what we’d do differently. That’s kind of what spawned Mechscape. A blank piece of paper and “How would we do it this time?”.

RPS: Okay… I know you’re not showing it yet, and aren’t talking about it in detail. Can you say what it isn’t?

Henrique Olifiers: It’s not Runescape in space. We started the whole process looking at the MMO space and realising that the world doesn’t need another Fantasy game. No elves, no orcs. So Sci-fi. Sci-fi is popular in movies, in comics, in single-player games… so why not here. That lead us to develop some new game mechanics which no other game uses. The reason why many Sci-fi MMOs haven’t worked is because they’re fantasy games dressed up to look like Sci-fi games. We looked at seminal games like Master of Orion and Ascendancy, and look at worked in those games, and make MMO mechanics inspired by those mechanics, in the way which Garriott created mechanics in Ultima Online inspired by the traditional Ultima games. Our seed was completely different. The end result is a game which looks and plays like no other MMO out there, from the mechanics, to how you interact with the other players…

RPS: Any idea when we’ll be seeing this?

Henrique Olifiers: We are in the final polishing phases of the project. While we don’t talk about dates, we want to ship it when we’re ready. We’re getting there.

RPS: You know, one day I’d love a developer to answer that question with “We’re going to ship it well before we’re ready. We just don’t care any more”.

Henrique Olifiers: The problem in the MMO space is they actually do that. They release in a state and then play catch-up for a year. That’s what we don’t want to do. It’s very easy to get into that. The game’s fun? Let’s go. But no, there’s a lot of things to get right before we unleash the full thing.

RPS: When the rest of the industry works on hyping a game literally years before it’s available, the non-info before release is really quite novel. What makes you take this approach?

Mark Gerhard: Learning various lessons with Runescape, we did bits of content and we told the players we were doing it, but when we launched, even though it was great content, it wasn’t appreciated by the players. We’d set ourselves up to underwhelm. It wasn’t deliberate, but it had become hyped. And then we did other stuff, like Player Houses. We kept schtum and did a surprise update. The players loved it. What we learned from all of that. Two things: if you get someone excited by something, they want to be able to access it now. We only want to start talking when it’s actually there. I know that’s very anti the Industry tradition… but we kind of believe in doing it our own way. It’s not that we think we know best, but we’ve had a few experiences which have taught us it’s probably wiser to go out there with one big splash. Up until a few months ago, everything we’ve done is totally viral. Something interesting to tell your friends down the pub. But if they’ve all heard the same press release, what have you got to talk about? It’s unusual and may be risky, but…. we’ll see.

Adam Tuckwell: We’re in a good position. We’ve worked on a game that we think is brilliant, but is very, very different. We’re launching a browser MMO, which again is quite rare. We’re in a position where as a privately owned company, we don’t have publishers breathing down our necks. We don’t have to overhype the product beforehand to keep Shareholders happy. We’re able to make a game which will impress people with the content.

RPS: Okay. MechScape. Can you tell me something you don’t have?

Henrique Olifiers: For instance, something that’s very strong in other MMOs: XP and levels. We don’t have any of that, as a result of what we’ve done. We’ve created these new mechanics which work in such a different way that you don’t even feel like you’re playing an MMO. I had a few external people in. People who’ve never see the game. Not family members or anything like that. If they hated the game, they’d have said. They sat and played, and eventually the monitor said let’s take a break as you’ve been playing for an hour… and you can see on the camera, they didn’t believe it. It cannot be 5 o’clock. That kind of thing. The game plays like the old strategy games which you can spend all night and not realise time is passing, because you’re not doing the same thing over and over.

RPS: You’ve hired ex-Sensible Supremo Jon Hare. How’s it going?

Mark Gerhard: Only six days or seven days. He certainly gets us. The DNA and culture which made us. We’re really excited about what good things can come of it, but it’s obviously early days.

RPS: It seems kinda symbolic of the sort of games you’re trying to reach. But you’re not actually just re-making these games at all, at least in a 1:1 fashion. It’s not a retro thing. It’s more like picking off where the work left off.

Mark Gerhard: If you take one of the most popular games – Arcanists, which is basically a spiritual successor to worms with magic and everything else. Taken that great mechanic, and added multiplayer facets to it and everything else and a huge variety of different weapons you can use. It was meant to be a 30 minutes a week thing, but I end up playing for hours after hour after hour after hour. We look at what bit was fun – and try and work out how it could be improved by bringing a multiplayer dimension to it or something else. Or we look at one game which we think was slightly weak, and missed the next level or next big power-up… and, hey, let’s try it[With adding that next level or power-up].

RPS: You seem quite proud of your technical achievements.

Henrique Olifiers: We try things which no-one else does. Like procedural texturing. No-one does that any more, and it used to be a big thing back in the day of the demo scene. Why don’t we do that with a game?

Mark Gerhard: If you think an Funorb game takes 9 to 18 months to build. There’s no doubt that we could build it in half the time if we didn’t have this almost anal dedication to performance and tuning. We make sure we have compatibility back to Java 1.1. We have to make the whole game fit in a 64Mb memory-heap. And most people would say “Just tell them to upgrade. Get a faster computer. It’s not our problem”. And just that will take another two, maybe 3 months of tuning. We have the luxuary of being able to do that, but it’s a symptom of the company’s DNA.

RPS: This speaks a lot of what we view as “technical prowess” as consumers, but it’s not exactly companies like you which come to mind when the phrase is said. But it’s something that you clearly concentrate on hugely.

Mark Gerhard: When I first joined the company, I got really excited and went to the board and said – there’s twenty products here you could patent. Let’s do it. We’ve got an enterprise web server which we run the world’s second biggest forum with 2.8 million posts a week, which runs on a 2.4 Celeronwith a gig of RAM. It’s a home computer 10 years ago, which runs the world’s second biggest forum. That’s our tech.

They came back: we create games. They needed to build that to do /this/. In essence, technology allows us to do what we do here, but there’s probably hundred of patents we could have made… but it doesn’t matter.

Adam Tuckwell: The fact users don’t always tell is a compliment as well. We released a new version of runescape last year, which allowed the graphics to be massively accelerated. Still running through the browser. We showed it to the other Devs at E3, and they thought it was too good to be in the browser. That’s fantastic. There are people who saw our products ten years ago, when they did look more basic, which cast their assumptions… but we’re constantly reforming what we do. It proves immensely successful.

Henrique Olifiers: Our aims are sometimes misjudged. There’s no reason we couldn’t make graphics as good as any box product with the current engine… except we wouldn’t reach the audience we want. Even with a lightweight hardware accelerated client which works with a 32Mb 3D card and a 1Ghz Machine… only 30% of our players are able to actually use it, as they have outdated drives and so on. The industry misjudges the potential of the users to run their games.

Mark Gerhard: The traditional game publishing seems to be the way you make a story is to say it’ll only work on the latest 3D card. Rather than going whether you hit the spot. Are you still accessible? You may get great game reviews. It may be groundbreaking. But can I play it at work? Can I play it at home? Can I play it at School?

Adam Tuckwell: And we’re totally okay with all the rest of the industry doing that.

That said i’ll keep my ears pricked up for more info on mechscape. It doesn’t have to be real time action but i better not be casting +power battery level 4 and having my lasers do 50% more damage but generate 65% more heat(60 second cooldown between uses).

Every time I’ve heard “RuneScape” in the past few years, I’ve just looked back on my brief time playing it, muttered something like “grindtastic!”, and promptly ignored the news.

On seeing this article, morbid curiosity prompts me to go to the site to see how it’s doing. I’m quickly left wondering if I’ve been thinking of the wrong game all this time — it looks nothing like what I remember.

I used to play RunEscape (Teehee) when I was… What, twelve? Anyway, it’s a terrible, terrible grindfest.

It’s surprising that this MechScape thing won’t have any levels… But character scaling can be done with equipment, really (Especially in a Sci-Fi setting. “Mechs” anyone?). And saying “People can waste a lot of time in our MMORPG without even noticing it!” isn’t such a great selling point. Especially after I got completely sick of MMORPGs when I grew past WoW.

I’d love a MMORPG with good gameplay that actually tries to be fun and immersive, instead of simply being addictive and pointless… But I doubt that the RuneScape devs will be the ones to make that.

I used to work for Jagex. Lovely people, lovely company, best job I ever had. Unfortuntely some personal stuff prevented the missus and I from moving down to Cambridge and the commute (Peterborough to Cambridge: easy when you’re working 9-5, a little harder when you’re working evenings/nights to cover international customers) was making me ill.

Also, I’m interested in this Amiga come webgame deal. Thing is, they’ve missed a trick by not aping Amiga style graphics. Whilst the mechanics of many of these games are great, those mechanics are dated, and, so, yes, blocky pixels and nostalgia ahoy – that’s how you raise the average age…

Well, unlike most of the other comments posted here, I actually got quite a bit of enjoyment out of Rune Scape. It was a really original game, where the NPCs often spouted out entertainingly ridiculous dialogue and many of the monsters were pretty entertaining. Yes, combat was a sort of sit-and-wait thing where you couldn’t make a whole lot of decisions, but the game was still fun. The thing that killed it for me was the community. People were so stupid, scamming and blathering about nothing. It was better on the members servers, especially at first, but as paying subscription fees became more common, everyone and their grand mother was jumping on the members servers and screwing around.

Pfft.

I still, to this day, say that if you had a group of good people to play with, and you JUST played with them, it would be fun.

Sadly, that isn’t possible. Everyone’s pretty scarred by their experiences there, so they don’t really have much interest in trying it again.

Thanks, Kieron! This was extremely interesting. They’re certainly on my radar now — like a psychedelic day-glo rainbow butterfly on a dull, dusty cathode ray tube display in a lonely, off-in-the-boondocks control tower with one mail flight a week.

I admit to being a long-term Runescape player – as a (much) older member of the community , I’d say that if you look for mature players you can find a good group of folk to play with, and there are in-game tools to filter out a lot of the rest :P. I’m following the dribble of MechScape (or whatever they eventually decide to call it) information with interest too…. I’d have to take Elman to task over his/her interpretation of this line: “The game plays like the old strategy games which you can spend all night and not realise time is passing, because you’re not doing the same thing over and over.” To me that isn’t ‘wasting time’, that sounds rather a lot like ‘having a good time’. Which is presumably why we all play games…

The absence of grind (assuming they really can pull that off) would be a true novelty in an MMO – even as an avid ‘Scaper, I find the slow grind in Runescape to be it’s biggest downside. I am pretty excited to see whether Jagex can make it work. It’s good to see RPS following the game’s development now!

Man, they both look like vampires. Which I guess is kind of apt, if you want to reach for a fairly crap metaphor about them sucking money out of youngsters who don’t know any better. Seriously though, I’m not sure why Runescape cops quite as much shit as it does. I never got into it (tried for a little while, at the behest of a high school friend), but as far as I can tell most of the reasonable complaints against it could be levelled at almost any MMO.

Re: the average age thing, I wonder how they calculated that. If they are including every account, the number is going to be skewed by older people who no longer play, but haven’t deleted their accounts. (I’m assuming accounts don’t expire, which could be wrong.)

Average age 16, get real as Jagex allowed 10 yr olds & under to play when they made older players quit. Best thing they do is encourage players to quit thus why make other games if they can’t encourage us better in RS. They don’t care about older players at all and don’t think of kids only allowed afew hours a week online playing. There’s too many failures in the game, grinding is stretched more and more to make especially mature players quit – you cant get far unless you hack or scam other players. RS used to resemble real life but now it encourages the worst ways to behave in society and all skills have been messed up then they make just PKers get gear for better skill levelling – they simply don’t care at all about the players. Jagex staff have died young from no daylight as has many of it’s younger players and here is the reason: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2008/12/27/important-vitamin-d-update.aspx so games these days should make grinding less trouble and allow just night time playing . Grinding is the biggest trouble to make us quit as who would pay for less ability & more rubbish added – Make Runescape2 pre GE/TradeLimit destruction days and Muckscape can be after that – at the moment the game is all PVPscape!

Yet another developer that fails to acknowledge Eve when talking about unconventional popular sci-fi MMOs. Although the games he mentioned would suggest controlling not an individual, which would be fairly unusual.

Played Runescape a fairly long time ago, must’ve played for maybe a few weeks to a month…lots of grinding and immaturity but it was fun when you got a good group of friends together. FunOrb is definitely an interesting project and I’ll keep an eye out for this MechScape.

I used to play Runescape quite a bit, and like it too. It had the best crafting system I’ve seen in any MMO and virtually all the quests are extremely high quality compared to any other MMO. Unfortunately, then they added the Grand Exchange and [Made Love Forcibly To – Ed] trading, and added the bigass arena which [Made Love Forcibly To – Ed] the wilderness. Then I gave up on Runescape for good.

Anyone who bashes the community hasn’t played long enough or become a member. Yes, there are a lot of immature kids playing – particularly in low leveled areas on free worlds.

But once you progress past that… you can do anything. Get a group of friends and fight the godwars bosses. Head into a pvp world and fight people anywhere… and runescape pvp is actually ridiculously complex and actually requires a lot of skill at times.

Runescape is great and Jagex is a very smart company.
They do things in a way I appreciate. RS is much more than just a level/xp grind. It seems that most of the negative comments are based on something that happened years ago. Or, are the people that hate how they took active steps to stop RWT and the scamming attached to it.

If all you do is stand and grind for xp by some form of power leveling you are missing the point of the game. You are playing it with a “destination focus” and not a “journey focus.” There is more to do in the game than most people take advantage of. There is a good mix of content that you have to pay attention to, and some that you can kind of “run in the background” while watching a movie or something.

There are a lot of young players, but that’s because it’s one of the best free games available. You don’t have to play very long to out grow the bulk of the immature players in the game. In a few months you will be in areas that they won’t be in.

If you do upgrade to members it’s only $6 a month with no software to buy. Being browser based you can access it from any computer. Also, it’s easy to adjust the graphics level for whatever computer are using at the time. The success of the product isn’t really surprising and I can’t wait to see how they take the next step with MechScape.

Average age 16? That’s a load of rubbish. Up to a couple of years ago you had to be 13 to play the game, so of course everyone younger (including me!) lied about their age – they made themselves older than they actually are.

I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don’t know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.

Read between the lines on that from Mark Gerhard, this is how long time players have been super-upset by him and Andrew. Runescape used to be so good and honest years ago but well before that useless GE took wealth out of existing accounts the game failed so 250k people went down to 80k players fast.
Now what is stated there is that Jagex get you to pay so they use you as idiots that they can keep changing the game direction to test players effects to work out for other games while making a hell of a mess to Runescape – shame we pay then they use all us without a care for us at all!!!
Is it just Jagex or are all mmorpg games using paying people to play with their accounts just to work out how to make a better game to suck more people into that. If you have any sense don’t play any of their games incase they do the same mess to all them aswell.
It’s better to get outside and get some daylight instead!

I’ll tell you something you didn’t learn from Runescape is this waiting 4 years to finish a product you should have done what you did with Runescape just make a small game then add to it overtime.

In the last year we have had at least a dozen MMOs that have had 4 years+ development before release ones that have even had 6 years after being behind release schedual for 2 years… what happened to them?

They lauched but they were full of bugs, exploits, unbalanced content that needed nerfing, supposted ground breaking new Pking concepts that no one likes many of these were descriped as WOW killers so big things were expected & they crashed & burned.

By spending years on something you don’t allow the feedback on your work it is a shame to see people put alot of work in when no one likes it & they just don’t play. On top of that you missout on early revenue.

I’m glad to hear that your taking your time on the release don’t rush it out until you think it’s really polished.
–

I would highly suggest to any new devlopers to put out a core of your game that is highly polished that you don’t need to fix up much on then expand from there gradually. You’ll get more feedback, more money from early subscriptions & less chance having 4 years of working going down the drain.

“32Mb 3D card and a 1Ghz Machine… only 30% of our players are able to actually use it, as they have outdated drives and so on. ”

When you relased RSHD after we ran your Spec checking softward you said most of your players could play it what’s with this 30% only at that level when RSHD has a lauching requirement of 1.5GHz Processor, 256MB RAM & 64MB graphics card? Where you lying when you launched RSHD about how compatable it was with our systems?

>>We’ve got an enterprise web server which we run the world’s second biggest forum with 2.8 million posts a week, which runs on a 2.4 Celeronwith a gig of RAM. It’s a home computer 10 years ago, which runs the world’s second biggest forum. That’s our tech.

One, typo at “celeronwith”.

Two: 4.8 million posts per week is only 8 posts a second. Assume with reads, administrative overhead, etc, and you get, maybe 20-60 requests a second. Not tough at all. Apache on a modern server will do 5000 requests a second, and nginx will do 10000. A caching proxy server using an abbreviated HTTP implementation and no dynamic content will do 40000 requests a second. If they’ve written a new server from scratch I’d like to take a look at it, but 60 requests a seconds isn’t exactly groundbreaking.

I used to work for Jagex too – and I hated the place. The company management tends to control freakery and total group-think, which isn’t that hard to maintain considering most of its employees are in their very early 20s and probably on their first job. I think they reserve their “creativity” for the senior managers.
Nevertheless, their technical achievements are impressive (check out the HD graphics – much better than your average browser game) and I am curious to see how MS will eventually turn out.

I used to work for Jagex too – and I hated the place. The company management tends to control freakery and total groupthink, which isn’t that hard to maintain considering most of the employees are in their very early 20s and on their first job. I think they reserve their “creativity” for the senior managers.
Nevertheless, their technical achievements are impressive (check out the HD graphics – much better than your typical browser game) and I am curious to see how MS will eventually turn out.

I am going to say what none of you will: runescape sucks and jagex did that. This article shows how clueless they are. The original runescape was great, and i don’t know why they changed it. I am an ex-scaper, and recently logged onto my old account. I am depressed with what they have done, and am glad that I quit.